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Comment by bioemerl | Hacker News Reader

Please use kbin instead - It's not run by literal Chinese state apologists.

The neat thing about federated social media is you don't have to federate with tankies even if you use their software. kbin appears to have some trouble working with Mastodon. My experience so far is boosts and replies on Mastodon are the #1 driver of new signups to the Lemmy instance I'm on, so it matters.

Kbin works better with mastodon, but the software is also newer, and the main instance is run by the single dev. They are currently behind cloudflare which disturbs federation.

I'm basing that on this: https://pawb.social/comment/20112

Which seems to be more a fundamental implementation issue than a CDN issue. I don't think they're talking about the main instance.

I don't really understand what they are saying.

> and posts from Mastodon to Kbin didn’t work either (they were all classified as microblog).

The beginning seems to contradict the end?

You don't have to, but bye joining and supporting the platform you're joining and supporting the developers.

What do you mean by that? Isn't Lemmy one of those projects where anyone can run an instance? Or are you referring to the developers? And could you please also elaborate what you mean by Chinese state apologists?

Anyone can run an instance but the main one is run by people who actively support states like China. You just go on there and read it for like 10 minutes and you'll find it.

I guess I don't understand that criticism. I'll just host my own instance, why would I care about the "main" instance. It's a criticism of the people on that platform and not of the platform itself...

kbin's in PHP/Symfony - I wonder how its instances will handle scaling, considering even (Rust-based) Lemmy instances are facing issues with the not-even-that-massive influx of visitors. Also, I like kbin's design better, but calling topics/subforums "Magazines" is a bit strange.

Wish there were one or two more good options in other languages. I know about Calckay/Misskey but they seem more microblog-like and not organised by topic at the top level.

Being able to port identity and posts/content between ActivityPub servers also seems like an issue, but I don't know if any major project has already solved that.

The bottleneck in web apps very rarely is in hot loops that benefit from native-code speed. Most of the time you spend waiting for an HTTP response is either waiting in line to be processed or waiting for the database or other external services to do the heavy processing. Optimizing on web means ensuring you're processing the queue efficiently and making fewer, more efficient database calls.

I'm not familiar with either implementation, but I wouldn't place an a priori bet on Rust over PHP for web. We've had many many years to figure out how to build efficient PHP apps and very little time to figure that out in Rust.

It really doesn’t matter, I don’t think. You can avoid the official-ish servers run by developers and join another, or host your own.

At the end of the day, Lemmy’s just server-software. Whatever the developer’s politics are, it doesn’t magically poison the software.

I like Lemmy’s stack etc. and do not want to spread some 'FUD' but are tankies (or alt-right) just politics? I think it is bit different than being liberal using software by conservative developers (or vice versa).

It depends on whether or not the author's politics bleed into the software or somehow influences the user-base; which could be disasterous. I think with Lemmy, though, there isn't much risk for that.

There are literally advocates for a genocidal state. Their politics are going to bleed over into the software eventually. To think otherwise is deeply naive.

I just don't see how they could manipulate, outside of their own servers?

Software updates.

The fact that they own the main domain and the main server means they can choose who to federate with cut off large parts of the network at a whim.

The fact they own the software means they can make it easier or harder to surprise or spread certain messages, and do so in very subtle ways.

Do not confuse open source with safe, something can be open source and be abused even if it's able to be self-hosted.

> The fact they own the software means they can make it easier or harder to surprise or spread certain messages, and do so in very subtle ways.

I just can’t imagine how, honestly! It’s not exactly trivial to programmatically hinder certain messages in a way that others won’t notice and complain about — as they did when Lemmy had hard-coded blacklists for slurs.

If anything, they'd abuse their control of the Lemmy.ml server, like you said.

All you have to do is do something like sneak in telemetry, add some sort of back door, who knows.

There are near infinite opportunities for a bad actor to sneak bad code in, so when you're dealing with a bad actor you just don't trust anything they do.

Running code from people who are tied to an authoritarian government is not something you should be doing ever.

It matters deeply when the people who run and develop the platform support something that simply shouldn't be supported, and at the end of the day even if they don't control the federation they do control a significant chunk of the direction and policies of the federation.

It would be like encouraging everyone to move to a place like voat. Don't give random extremists to the opportunity to control media or any form of narrative.

I honestly don't think the Lemmy developers have any control other than that over lemmy.ml. And with Lemmy’s user-base spreading out to use other servers, their influence is decreasing more and more each day.

seemed on a brief look that kbin had a bunch of crypto nonsense associated with it, and I noped right out

lol can you plz link this drama to me

There is a flagged comment with this on HN (search google to find it) that links to it.

This comment has a reply from dang which reads:

> This comment breaks more than one of HN"s guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar, don't call names, and avoid unsubstantive and/or flamebait posts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com